TL;DR if all goes according to plan, the next major version of QGIS will feature an updated set of core libraries; among the many benefits this will bring is support for proper rendering for a whole new range of complex languages

QGIS has long been recognized for its excellent Unicode encoding support which enables handling of data and the rendering of maps in a wide range of languages, including but not limited to complex Indic-based writing sytems such as Khmer or Lao.

This is possible in large part due to QGIS’ underlying foundation: Qt. As part of the forthcoming 3.0 release, QGIS is planning to leave Qt4 behind – which has for years now gone into maintenance-only mode - and upgrade to actively developed Qt5, the framework's latest version. This is a significant change and it is cause for celebration as it will come with a wide range of ameliorations all around, across all platforms.

Over here, we are particularly excited about one specific improvement: the revamped text shaping engine.

The what?

Text shaping is the process through which text is converted into glyphs and positioned to form characters. In Qt, that process is handled by a library called harfbuzz. Under Qt4, the library relies on its first generation codebase. Under Qt5 however, a rebooted library codebase (referred to as harfbuzz-ng) is used.

The difference between those two libraries? Over four years worth of improvements! The source tree of the original harfbuzz library saw its last commit on July 30, 2012. The harfbuzz-ng tree however is actively developed, with its latest release, 1.3.0, dating July 21, 2016.

Tangible benefits

Based in Southeast Asia, we routinely produce maps featuring complex languages from the region. One such language is Burmese, which Qt4 simply does not support due to its use of harfbuzz’s first generation codebase.

When rendering Burmese language with QGIS compiled against Qt4, things looked like this:

The glyphs’ shapes and positioning are all wrong, resulting in illegible text. For those who are not familiar with Indic-based languages such as Burmese, the above would be like taking the following text “I love QGIS!” and rendering it “LvQg e! SIo”.

For those interested in building QGIS against Qt5, follow the instructions on this post by OpenGIS.

Note: Windows users have not – contrary to Linux users - been virtually stuck in 2012 when it comes to text rendering as Qt4 defers to the system’s uniscribe library to do shaping; uniscribe is actively developed by Microsoft with new versions shipped alongside Windows updates.